It is November, friends, and if you have been part of the Coffee Lunch Coffee community for more than a year, you already know what that means: I blog every single day this month. It is one of my favorite traditions, and this year I have a particularly exciting theme to carry us through.
As a gift from our dear family friend Ben Conte, I recently discovered a gem: The Luck Field Manual: Rules for Engineering Serendipity by The Polymath Investor. This remarkable little guide lays out 31 practical tips for increasing what the author calls your “luck surface area,” the idea being that luck is not something that simply happens to you. It is something you can systematically cultivate.
I believe that wholeheartedly. And I think it connects directly to everything we talk about here: building meaningful professional relationships, showing up with intention, and staying curious about the people and opportunities around us.
So, join me for all 30 (okay, 31 – an extra post for extra luck) days of November as we dig into these tips together, one per day, and explore what it looks like to engineer a little more serendipity in our professional lives and beyond.
Let’s get lucky.
Here is a truth I have come to believe deeply: You cannot engineer which conversation will change your life. You can only engineer the conditions that make more of those conversations possible.
That is the heart of Tip #1 in The Luck Field Manual by The Polymath Investor: Make Volume Your Ally. The idea is simple. The more attempts you make, the greater your chances of a win. Not because every attempt pays off, but because you cannot predict which one will.
The Polymath Investor frames it through the lens of investing, citing Peter Lynch’s famous approach of turning over as many rocks as possible. The person who examines the most companies finds the most hidden gems. The same logic holds in relationships.
Think about how many of your most meaningful professional connections started as low-stakes conversations. A quick coffee. A brief exchange after a panel. A chance introduction at an event you almost skipped. You did not know, going in, that it would matter. It mattered anyway.
This is not about being transactional. It is about staying in motion. It is about saying yes to the coffee, attending the event, accepting the introduction, showing up even when you are not sure why. Relationship building is not a precision sport. It is a volume game played with genuine curiosity and authenticity.
In my correspondence with The Polymath Investor, I learned of a concept in decision science called the exploration vs. exploitation paradox, and it maps beautifully onto how we build our networks. Exploration is the casting: meeting broadly, saying yes often, staying open to the unexpected. Exploitation is the keeping: concentrating your time and energy on the rare connections that prove genuinely meaningful. Both matter. But for most people, the harder mental shift is the first one. We tend to stay close to the familiar, the comfortable, the already-known. Volume is the antidote to that tendency.
The Polymath Investor writes that prolific creators like Picasso made thousands of works, giving himself more chances for a few to become timeless. Your network is your body of work. The more connections you tend, the more likely a few of them will become something extraordinary.
So, reach out to that contact you have been meaning to reconnect with. Accept the invitation that feels slightly inconvenient. Say yes to the introduction that seems tangential. Cast widely. Then, when the rare good ones reveal themselves, invest deeply. You are not being indiscriminate. You are being intentional about staying in motion, because motion is where luck finds you.
Happy Networking!
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This post is part of a series inspired by The Luck Field Manual: Rules for Engineering Serendipity by The Polymath Investor. The full manual is well worth your time. Read about it and download it here.